Honeypot

Peter Simmons is everybody’s favourite neighbour, always willing and eager to help. But he’s also a man of roaming hands, a man who won’t take “no” for an answer, a man who takes whatever he wants, whether it’s cookies from a jar or the sweet as honey single Mom who moved in next door. But sometimes, getting caught with a hand in the wrong cookie jar can be deadly…

Honeypot is is a short story of 2400 words. This story is also available as part of the collection Murder in the Family along with seven other short crime stories.

The story was inspired by an actual case of a man who turned out to have been sexually harassing women for decades and always got away with it, because he was such a nice and helpful man that no woman dared to complain. I don’t think that guy ever went as far as raping anybody, but he was known to be harasser from his twenties up to way beyond pension age.

The guy in question was not allergic to bee stings, though. That bit was inspired by a relative who is allergic against bee stings and consequently must take his EpiPen (it’s a brandname, who’d have guessed?) everywhere he goes.

Hannah’s description of Peter’s legs having “the texture of Stilton cheese, a sickly white shot through with blue varicose veins” was borrowed from Martin Walser who used a similar phrase to describe the legs of his seventysomething protagonist Karl von Kahn during a sex scene with a twentysomething actress in his 2008 novel Angstblüte. The phrase always stuck in my head as a singularily icky way to describe body parts during a sex scene (not that it’s supposed to be icky with Walser). And since Hannah’s sex scene with Peter is icky, I borrowed Walser’s bluecheese imagery.

Of all the criminals, villains and murderers found in the collection Murder in the Family, Peter is the one who disgusts me most. After writing the short scene in his POV, I felt the urgent need to shower.